To Wales and back again
Sunday, 3rd September 2006 by julieWith memories of last year’s very tedious trip up to Wales (on a Friday afternoon) still surprisingly fresh, we took the whole of Friday off for getting there this year. Despite high hopes of an early start, we were only on the road by 11h00. Six and a half hours later – far too many of them spent on the M6! :yawn: – we were in Anglesey.
In Wales (well, Anglesey at any rate) there’s a rather quaint system of giving all the houses names instead of numbers. This is all very well if you’re the local postie, who has every house down the street committed to memory, but much less convenient when you’re crawling along the street in a car wondering when your charmingly named B&B is going to show up.
Once again we were diving with Quest Diving, in Scott Waterman’s diver-friendly hard boat, Endeavour.
Unlike last year’s sunny skies, we had looming grey clouds to contend with on the Saturday as we set out. But on the positive side, there was minimal wind and the water was a relatively warm 16°C. Rather pleasant to leap into after spending long minutes wrestling with diving kit in a full wetsuit.
Our first dive of the weekend was a pretty offshore wreck, the SS Mona. There wasn’t much of her left, but she was just bustling with crabs. And every inch of the framework above the sand was covered – literally – with fat white and orange plumose anemones. Most of us came up with big slimy patches from accidentally getting a little too close to the wreck and popping the darn things.
On the second dive, the camera got its first proper open-water exposure (having taken just the water-proof case down on the first dive). Tom was the photographer, and the important lesson we took away from this dive was that the macro setting is really necessary if you want to get anything approaching decent focus. 
Fortunately at this level of resizing, you can’t see the blurring – much.
We had another civilised start on Sunday – 11h00. Luxury! Unfortunately, despite the patchy sun, the diving conditions were again extremely poor; mostly from the storm run-off from the week’s heavy rains. Nevertheless, Tom managed to capture some of the best images of the weekend up close, despite the 1 – 2m visibility!
And his top macro shot of the weekend, was a tiny dahlia anemone, which out of all the photos that weekend, took the prize for clarity and focus! (Click the image to see the full-size version.)
In between dives, we got to spend some time in the sun, and got a good view of the seals off Seal Island.
On the final dive, I got the camera, but nothing really worthwhile came of it. (Focusing, in even a slight current, turns out to be harder than I thought!) And then, at the skipper’s recommendation, and democratically agreed by all on the boat, we decided not to dive on Monday because the forecast indicated nothing good would come of it. (While it’s disappointing to lose a day’s diving, beating the long-weekend traffic back into London is a significant advantage!)
So that night we found the only restaurant in town that would take 11 people at 21h00 and without a booking – the Menai Tandoori (yes, it was rather average); and the next day we got a nice early start on our trip back to London and clocked a smooth 5 hours door to door. :grin:
